Remarks delivered by Ambassador Arindam Bagchi, Permanent Representative of India to UN and other IOs at WHO’s Launch of Global Initiative on Digital Health Tuesday 20 February 2024, 2 pm – 3.30 pm, Geneva
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Director General Dr. Tedros,
Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Namaskar. Good afternoon.
1. It gives me immense pleasure to be part of this important occasion of WHO’s launch of the Global Initiative on Digital Health.
2. Digital solutions have immense potential to assist in addressing various urgent and interconnected challenges facing the global healthcare system. For some time now, there has been a growing realization of digital health being an enabler for provision of accessible, affordable, quality, and timely services, supporting the goal of Universal Health Coverage. Thus, building on the foundation of previous WHO and G20 meetings, which recognized digital health as an important aspect of strengthening global public health, India’s G20 Presidency last year prioritized the creation of this ‘Global Initiative on Digital Health’.
3. As early as May 2018, India had tabled a Digital Health resolution at the 71st World Health Assembly. We were heartened to see WHO action this on priority by establishing their Department for Digital Health and Innovation in April 2019, and publishing the Global Strategy on Digital Health 2020-2025. And now, GIDH will play a critical role in supporting the implementation of the Global Strategy. GIDH would also aim to ensure that country-led digital health efforts are guided by standards and built on strong foundations of Digital Public Infrastructure.
4. We all would agree that it was the Covid pandemic which served as a catalyst for greater adoption and implementation of digital health globally, with deployment of digital health tools to monitor and manage Covid. India successfully deployed a data-driven approach for a proactive response, in both pandemic tracing as well as vaccines and healthcare delivery. Our COWIN platform successfully facilitated one of the largest vaccination drives in human history, managing the delivery of more than 2.4 billion vaccine doses and providing globally verifiable digital vaccination certificates.
5. The Hon’ble Health Minister of India’s message today referred to our flagship national programme, the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, which is creating personal digital health accounts for our citizens, as well as keeping their health records safe and easily accessible. Another of India's national digital health platforms, e-Sanjeevani, has facilitated 140 million tele-health consultations to date.
Excellencies, Friends,
6. The GIDH would have a critical role to leverage Digital Health Regional Networks to ensure the success of broad-basing digital health delivery. It would also be important for GIDH to support individual country efforts to adopt, review, own, and strengthen national digital health strategies, plans and efforts.
7. Going forward, GIDH also presents us all an opportunity to strengthen global advocacy for sustainable digital health transformation and providing a platform to highlight the usefulness of digital technologies for more equitable, accessible and universal health delivery. GIDH can play an important role in coordinating with other international organisations and forums for facilitating public-private and private-private partnerships, which would be particularly valuable for financing and implementation of national digital health initiatives.
8. Let me conclude by warmly congratulating DG Dr. Tedros, GIDH Lead Dr. Labrique, all the WHO colleagues as well as all the partners and supporters of GIDH, for today’s launch; and by reaffirming India’s continued commitment to contributing to its success.
Thank you. Namaskar.
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